Don’t Let Winter Catch Your Landscape Off Guard – Essential Prep Tasks That Could Save Your Investment

As temperatures begin to drop across Delaware County, PA, savvy property owners know that winter preparation isn’t just about protecting their homes—it’s about safeguarding their landscape investments. With Delaware County experiencing a humid subtropical climate featuring cold winters with average low temperatures around 25°F, the time to act is now, before harsh weather takes its toll on your carefully cultivated outdoor spaces.

Your landscape represents a significant financial investment that can either add thousands to your property value or become a costly liability requiring extensive repairs come spring. Sudden freezes after a period of warm weather often do more damage to plants than a freeze during a period of cold weather, making proactive winter preparation absolutely critical for Pennsylvania homeowners.

Understanding Delaware County’s Unique Winter Challenges

Delaware County averages 16 inches of snow per year, and the area’s geological conditions include expansive clay soils and seasonal freeze-thaw cycles that can destroy improperly prepared landscape features. These conditions create specific challenges that require targeted preparation strategies.

Strategic drainage placement protects hardscape investments by eliminating the water accumulation that causes foundation settlement and frost heave damage during winter months. This is particularly important for homeowners who have invested in patios, walkways, and retaining walls.

Essential Plant Protection Strategies

Protecting your plants begins with understanding their vulnerabilities. Most plant parts can adapt to cold, but fruits and roots do not develop good cold tolerance, making root protection a priority. To keep plants healthy avoid late-summer fertilization and pruning, supply plants with adequate moisture, and mulch to keep moisture and temperature levels even.

Professional Landscapers Delaware County PA recommend applying mulch strategically. Wait until after killing frost to apply winter mulch, which insulates plant stems and roots from freezing while preventing fluctuation in soil temperatures. By applying 10 to 15 cm of organic matter (cedar mulch, decorative bark, cocoa hulls) over the root zone, you can prevent the cold from causing damage to the roots and crown of your plants, but wait for the first frost on the ground before covering the root zone of perennials with mulch.

Pre-Winter Watering and Moisture Management

Proper hydration is crucial for winter survival. Watering landscape plants before a freeze can help protect plants, as wet soil will absorb more heat during the day and radiate it during the night. Soil moisture protects both dormant and evergreen plants during cold snaps, as moist soils hold more heat than dry soils, so watch the weather forecast and be sure to irrigate all plantings at least 24 hours before hard-freezing weather arrives.

However, timing is everything. Keep in mind that prolonged saturated soil conditions damage the root systems of most plants, so balance is key in your watering approach.

Protecting Trees and Shrubs

Tree protection involves multiple strategies. Trees with thin or smooth bark may benefit from a trunk wrap in late fall to protect against southwest injury or sunscald, which is caused by alternate freezing and thawing of water in the trunk and occurs on the southwest portion exposed to warm afternoon sun.

Snow can weigh down the branches of shrubs with frail structures such as arborvitae, boxwoods, cypress, young rhododendrons and azaleas, so knock the snow off branches and wrap rope around them, tying the branches upward to help restructure them to a more upright position before the storm, but leave snow at the base of plants because it insulates roots.

Container Plant Considerations

Container plants face unique winter challenges. A good rule of thumb is to consider the climate of a container to be two hardiness zones colder than your local climate—if you live in zone 7, then the container plant must be hardy to zone 5 to survive winter in a container.

It’s especially important to protect container plants since the pots can freeze, so pull them into an unheated garage, basement, greenhouse, cold frame or similar site where the temperature stays above freezing. If you have no place indoors for plants, safeguard them by covering with evergreen boughs, straw, leaves, old blankets, sheets, burlap, woven row cover, or plastic, and wrap pots in bubble wrap for even more protection.

Covering and Shelter Techniques

When using covers, proper technique matters. Covers that extend to the ground and do not touch plant foliage can lessen cold injury by trapping heat, but be careful when using plastic as foliage that touches plastic coverings is often injured since the cover actually takes heat away from the plant.

Use stakes, posts, PVC pipes, patio furniture, saw horses, wire loops, or other structures to elevate the covering so it does not touch the foliage, and remove the covering the next day when temperatures get above freezing.

Lawn and Hardscape Winter Prep

Rake leaves and remove debris, as these items may smother your lawn and stunt the growth of new grass, or worse, kill it altogether. Apply 2–4 inches of bark mulch, hay, or shredded leaves around plants to protect roots, retain moisture, and insulate against cold.

For hardscape elements, proper drainage becomes critical. Delaware County’s clay soils create drainage challenges that require engineered solutions beyond basic grading, with professional architects designing French drain systems with properly sized aggregates and geotextile fabrics that prevent soil infiltration while maintaining water flow.

Timing Your Winter Preparation

November is a great time to begin winterizing your garden, as by this point most plants have finished their active growing season but the ground hasn’t yet frozen, giving you time to put protective measures into place to help shield your plants from winter’s harshest elements.

Install your winter protection as late as possible, ideally once the ground has frozen and the leaves have fallen, or even after a good snowfall, as doing this later will prevent your plants from heating up if there are sudden temperature changes that could cause them to come out of hibernation.

Professional vs. DIY Winter Prep

While many winter preparation tasks can be handled by homeowners, complex issues like drainage problems, large tree protection, and hardscape winterization often require professional expertise. V. Serrano’s Landscaping has been the go-to choice for homeowners and businesses in Delaware County for over five years, specializing in lawn maintenance, landscaping, hardscaping, tree care and fence installation, with their team combining skilled craftsmanship with top-tier customer service.

The investment in professional winter preparation pays dividends when spring arrives. Rather than facing costly plant replacements, hardscape repairs, and landscape reconstruction, proactive homeowners enjoy seamless transitions into the growing season with their investments intact and thriving.

Don’t let winter catch your landscape unprepared. The steps you take now will determine whether you’ll be admiring a resilient, beautiful landscape come spring or dealing with the expensive aftermath of winter damage. Your landscape investment deserves the protection that proper winter preparation provides.